Is the new Lenscrafters clearance sale commercial suggesting there are pilots who fly planes with incorrect eyeglass perscriptions, or just unfashionable frames? Because I’ve been alerted to so much eye-opening transportation information (i.e. the frequency of subway deaths, chances of pilots falling asleep mid-flight, long-haul truck drivers using computers while they’re driving and plunging into lakes) that I feel nervous to travel at all.

I want to write a story in which one of the characters has a neighbor who hums too loudly.

He has a rent-controlled apartment by the park that he gives up because of a floormate’s persistent humming and his girlfriend dumps him. Is that a reason to break up with someone who would give up a great place for something so trivial? I think so. It’s probably a sign of erratic behavior in the future.

Would someone break up a party of people who were just humming? Could it get so loud even in a filled apartment that someone would call the cops? It’s not a very offensive activity. It might even be soothing in a womb-like way. People are humming in unison next door and through the walls you can sleep and relax like it was your mother’s dulcet tones when you were just a fantasy of her future child.

Like sleeping on a rocking boat. The best sleep I’ve ever had.

I started this new thing today: When I really want to go out and buy food that I don’t need to eat, I’ll take some of the money that I would have wasted on junk and use it to help someone. Today, after work, I was on my way to buy a frozen pizza. Before I could get to the grocery store I passed the flower stand outside of the market. I started thinking that I would really like to have some flowers in my apartment, and then, after finding cool, beautiful flowers that I’ve never seen before, I decided to buy them for my manager/friend who attended her grandma’s funeral today. It was just a humble bouquet, not fit for a funeral, but it showed that I was thinking of her and she might want some nice flowers. It’s good for me to spend my money on charity and friendship or a nice gift for myself rather than waste it on tools of isolation.

I think I’m going to really test what I can possibly do with this blog. “I don’t know how many years on this Earth I got left. I’m gonna get real weird with it.” I’ve never even looked at some of those buttons up there.

Living life is so much for me about all 5 senses. How are we watching people in movies and TV or even looking at art, totally satisfied, without smelling what they smelled and hearing what they heard. That seems incredibly unfulfilling. un-full – feeling. I love to notice everything in the periphery. One of my favorite ever things in life is when an actor is so still that you can see the pulse in his neck or a twitch in his finger. I reminds me that we aren’t all that different.

Tip: Listen to your iPod (with headphones) on shuffle while you wash dishes. You can’t easily skip songs, so you give “new” music (that really has always been on your computer, but somehow you have avoided ever listening to it) a chance to be heard in its entirety with a bit of focus. It makes dish washing infinitely more joyful and it’s so fun to discover music that you really love. Also, remember every now and then to listen to an album from start to finish. That’s how it was meant to be heard.

I don’t know what I would do with my life if I couldn’t have music. Taking a page from Degrassi (as always), maybe I’ll use song titles for my blog entries. I almost posted this on Facebook during that whole trend, but then I remembered that I didn’t want to. But it’s pretty good, so —

My Life According to Ani DiFranco

1. Are you male or female: Lost Woman Song

2. Describe yourself: I’m No Heroine

3. How do you feel about yourself: Shrug

4. Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriend: Imagine That

5. Describe your current boy/girl situation: Anyday

6. Describe your current location: Here For Now

7. Describe where you want to be: Every State Line

8. Describe your best friend: Fixing Her Hair

9. Your favorite color is: Pale Purple

10. You know: The True Story of What Was

11. What’s the weather: Beautiful Night

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called: My IQ (and I would challenge people in a battle of wits a la Ben Stein, but instead of giving away my own money, my parting gifts would be more in the vein of dryer sheets or slightly expired yogurt. )

13. What is life to you: Educated Guess

14. What is the best advice you have to give: Make Them Apologize

15. If you could change your name what would you change it to: Akimbo

16. Describe how you live: Evolve

17. Describe how you love: Willing to Fight

18. What would you ask for if you had just one wish: Virtue

19. What’s the worst thing that could happen: What If No One’s Watching

When you are sitting in an empty McDonald’s at 8:45 on a Sunday night (save a homeless man at the end of your banquette), you are obsessively replaying the 2 minute speech you just gave with shaky hands and an even shakier voice to a class of fellow apathetic community college students, the waitstaff is flipping the chairs onto the tables and sweeping around you, and Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” is blaring over the restaurant’s sound system,

I have so much on my mind. There is the potential for so much to be written.

I should be using these empty days to be productive, but I can’t get myself to do anything.

This is a horrible feeling.

“Resistance knows that the more psychic energy we expend dredging and re-dredging the tired, boring injustices of our personal lives, the less juice we have to do our work.”

“The condition becomes a work of art in itself, a shadow version of the real creative act the victim is avoiding by expending so much care cultivating his condition.”

“Remember, the part of us that we imagine need healing is not the part we create from; that part is much deeper and stronger. The part we create from can’t be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we’ve got, the better and richer that part becomes.”

“Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance. This second, we can sit down and do our work.

Those are segments (not chronological) of Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art. Read it.

Time is a matter of fact/ And it’s gone and it’ll never come back/ And mine is wasted all the time/ Tears, stupid tears, bring me down/ Tie my brain into a knot/ These tears, stupid tears, bring me down

-Daniel Johnston

"Look, I'm on MTV, David." (Probably the most supremely happy moment I've ever seen. Happiness to the point of being pretty heartbreaking... Watch the documentary.)

I woke up this morning after a night full of strange and vivid dreams. My mother always told me how much she hated hearing about my dreams, so I’ll keep them to myself, but let me tell you they were like watching quirky short films that I only wish I could recreate when I’m awake. They were emotional and funny and scary and real; the kind that you are sort of sad to wake up from and you are reminded of all day.

Dreams are, by definition, creations of your own subconscious. It’s all you. All your creativity. So maybe if I’m feeling totally unmotivated and untalented, I should just crawl into bed and be reminded that in the back of my mind, underneath all of the neuroses and issues and walls, I have a thriving and original imagination that I could potentially tap.

A little woman in girl’s clothing with a gap in her baby teeth.
Parents divorce.
Kids kiss on TV.
Asked to describe her teacher in a poem she writes:
Sexy.
A sponge for things not made for her.
But maybe
-secretly-
they are pleased she is soaking up their shit.
Her Mom guards her from the subway and kidnappers and “New York”,
but still she’s being snatched.
She’s called a hot mess, but let’s change that.
Someone must look after her
and my reign is over.Please.
She is beautiful.
She thinks she’s a woman, but let her be a girl.
She’ll be famous one day.
Get her there safely.

I’m sitting here on the floor of my living room watching Food Network’s new series “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”, which features FN stars talking about… you know. These men and women are so passionate about food: cooking it, eating it, describing what makes it delicious. This episode is all about deep fried food. Doughnuts, hot dogs, french fries, bacon, pork rinds. Nothing gourmet, absolutely guilty pleasures. But really celebrated and worthy of the calories because of the joy it brings to the customers’ lives.

I am a woman who has had an eating disorder for as long as I can remember, but realistically, absolutely more than half of my life. I have trouble classifying it because I, along with most other people in the world, are just beginning to acknowledge disordered eating that does not involve binging and purging or starvation. I graze, I binge, I sit around hating myself for the food I ate, the money I spent and the isolation I enforce on myself.

For all of the time I spend thinking about food and eating it, I barely ever enjoy it. I can’t even call the bad food that I eat “guilty pleasures” because the way I feel before, during and afterward is hardly pleasurable.

When I was younger, the first thing I ever wanted to be was a chef. I can’t remember ever helping out in the kitchen, or being a particularly daring eater, but at eight years old I knew I wanted to go to Cornell to be a culinary arts major. (I think I heard my dad say once that Cornell was a good school for aspiring chefs, so it’s an idea that I clung to blindly.) Today, I wonder why I wanted to cook in the future, but had no desire to practice it as a kid or teenager. Did I want to surround myself with food all day long? Or did I watch my parents (mostly Mom) cook dinner and make the meal special every single night until I went to college, and I wanted to continue the tradition of spending time with the people I love eating delicious food? Maybe I just met a chef when I was a kid and thought working in a restaurant would be fun. I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that after 12 years of wasting calories and time on food that has done nothing for me except make me hate my body, I really want to learn how to cook. I want to spend the time on myself to create something simple and nutritional and satisfying. I don’t believe that diets work and I don’t want to restrict the kinds of food I eat. I just can’t continue to use food to avoid living and feeling the natural ups and downs of being an adult.

Now, when I cook for myself, I feel like I am wasting time because the result isn’t what I excepted and the meal is over much faster than it took to make it. I want to learn to enjoy the time I spend in the kitchen, appreciating myself as someone who doesn’t deserve to eat processed shit and garbage ingredients. I want it to be an activity that I will look foward to every day, because I know that it will encourage a turning point in how I feel about myself and what my life is all about. Let’s do this.

“It is unfortunate that individuals and other outside parties are trying to profit from material which is clearly private. I have had the privilege to speak to people across the country, both gay and straight, on a number of critical issues including safe sex. More important than the embarrassment of this incident is the misleading message these images send. I apologize and cannot emphasize enough the importance of responsible sexual practices.”

Dustin Lance Black is a good guy.

Lance Sandwich Crackers? I’ve never even heard of those and the commercial comes on now?

Am I part of a community trying to lose weight? Have I decided I’m ready to lose weight? I don’t need it anymore?

No wonder actresses are neurotic messes. People who have had fluctuating weight are sensitive to anyone noticing their body. Their job has become encouraging people to notice their body. I need privacy.

Is Giada De Laurentiis someone’s celebrity fantasy? Not that she doesn’t deserve to be, because I love her. But she doesn’t seem to be a heavy hitter on the tabloid scene.

Are there people who actually appreciate the time it took to compose this video? They find it worth seeing?

That mozzarella/raspberry jam/rosemary/brown sugar panini looks like the best thing you could ever put in your mouth.

Are there people out there who’s word processor dictionary recognizes all of the key terms of today’s entertainment-centric generation? They spend so much time writing about Kirsten Dunst’s every vaginal waxing that constantly seeing her name with a squiggly red line underneath it would send him round the psychotic bend. But of course, even writing this is tempting me to add Beyonce to my dictionary because the line is driving me nuts. And I want to have the accent automatically pop up!

I have had Fleet Foxes’ Blue Ridge Mountains in my head ALL DAY. Maybe hearing it will give me a little relief from the repetition.

Note to self: I should see Away We Go.

My goal for my life: For someone to think I have a genius mind. I don’t care; It could be my six year old daughter before she finds out I use Wikipedia to answer all of her questions. I should write a book about different heroes in peoples’ lives. What makes someone a hero? What makes someone a worshipper? I have to talk to Kendra about that.

I have a fully aged scar on my leg that I’ve never noticed before. Do I hate my body so much that I disregard its existence completely? Yes. For now. Not forever.

I could watch this over and over:

As my father so thoughtfully told me at the age of 12, I am such a fag hag.